After I finished it looked (just) to me like I missed something. That got me hooked and I was musing the whole night about that. And I think I got my point: In my daily work I’m meanwhile used to work intensive with my iChat jabber client. In the past I saw that just with programmers and my kids. So it was always to me a little bit “childish”. But I learned to appreciate the fact, to see my team members status: available, away, busy and “out of reach”. It simply saves time to see them online and talk to them instead of trying to make “blind” telephone calls. I’m more and more encourage people from other teams and companies, I’m working with, to use a jabber client. It simply eases communication and saves time.

Now back to may point of Lars presentation. I would suggest to see a chat client as the perfect representation of the team section. The meta data behind both are nearly similar, and the value of team members is increased when you see them in your virtually team space with their availability status. If you have a close look to Lars final poster, most of the colored elements are representing software, except “team” which is more a pre-condition for the whole thing. To me, a team can be represented in an ideal way by a chat client system. It’s just an important part of freeform collaboration, especially for distributed teams.